One of the biggest challenges of foldable phones is screen durability. Samsung’s Galaxy Fold and Huawei’s Mate X look crazy futuristic, but they have plastic screens that aren’t as scratch-resistant as the glass displays on regular phones. 

That’s no good and will be a big step backwards for durability. However, a new bendable glass from Corning Inc., makers of the scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass found on the back and front of many phones including iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones, might be the solution to the problem.

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In a recent interview with Wired, Corning senior vice president and general manager John Bayne says the plastic polymers used in these new foldable devices is better suited for repeated bending, but they’re not as durable as glass.

But making glass that bends and doesn’t crack or shatter with repeated folding is tricky. Even more challenging is making foldable glass that plays nice with the many touchscreen transistors that it needs to interface.

Bayne told Wired tat Corning is working on an “ultrathin, bendable glass that’s 0.1 millimeters thick and can bend to a 5 millimeter radius.”

Corning is making progress, but there’s still a long way to go. “The back of the problem we’re trying to break, the technical challenge, is, can you keep those tight 3- to 5-millimeter bend radii and also increase the damage resistance of the glass,” Bayne said.

The glass maker is also experimenting with combining its super bendable Willow Glass with its really durable Gorilla Glass. However, a breakthrough that allows for a combined bendable glass to be suitable for foldable phones is still a work in progress.

 “We have glasses we’ve sampled to customers, and they’re functional, but they’re not quite meeting all the requirements,” Bayne said. “People either want better performance against a drop event or a tighter bend radius. We can give them one or the other; the key is to give them both.”

Which begs the question, who has Corning sent these samples to? No doubt all kinds of companies, especially phone makers who are working on their own foldable devices. 

Notably, chatter suggests Apple could be one of the companies that are looking into the foldable glass tech. Apple’s reportedly working on its own foldable devices (who isn’t?) and has even filed for a patent related to them.

Exciting as an iPhone that folds open into an iPad would be, let’s also reel in expectations. Just because Samsung and Huawei and a handful of other Chinese phone makers are are working on foldable phones doesn’t mean Apple will follow suit.

If that were the case, Apple would have released MacBooks with touchscreens years ago, mimicking Windows and Chromebooks, which have them. Same for an Apple Watch with a round display. Ditto for an iPhone without a notch, but with a “hole punch” or motorized camera mechanism.

Apple is rarely first to embrace a new technology and usually chooses to wait until many of the early issues are resolved. Foldable phones are unproven. From the crease, to the thickness, to the software, to the price, they’re just not ready yet. Samsung and Huawei are jumping the gun with foldable phones to likely curtail plateauing phone sales. Apple will likely wait it out. 

If Corning or another company figures out how to make foldable glass that meets Apple’s tight design tolerances, maybe (and that’s a big maybe) we might see a foldable iPhone in a few years. But I wouldn’t bet on it happening.

Winter’s been inching its way toward us for quite some time, and now it’s finally here.

The official Game of Thrones Season 8 trailer just dropped, and after months of teaser clips, photo reveals, and other media, we’re ready to sink our teeth into any and all footage we can get. Unsurprisingly, the full trailer doesn’t disappoint. It begins with action and only intensifies from there.

“I know death. He’s got many faces. I look forward to seeing this one,” a stoic Arya Stark (Maisie Williams) says in a tense voiceover interspersed with scenes of her looking particularly distressed. What is she running from, or perhaps the question is who?

We then see swaths of soldiers readying ships for battle and Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) looking up in awe to see dragons soaring above her in Winterfell. Meanwhile, Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) smirks knowingly, a familiar look she’s still wearing (with her wine, of course) even after everything she’s gone through.

“They’re coming. Our enemy doesn’t tire. Doesn’t stop. Doesn’t fear,” warns Jon Snow (Kit Harington) as he cautions his allies against the upcoming battle with the menacing White Walkers.

“I promised to fight for the living. I intend to keep that promise,” says Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) confidently.

The trailer closes out with what looks like the beginning of the fated battle between our heroes and the White Walkers, and by the time it’s all over, you’ll be on the edge of your seat. Whew.

A recent Entertainment Weekly exclusive revealed a “sledgehammer” coming for Jon Snow, just as he thinks he knows himself and has found love. Without spoiling anything, longtime Game of Thrones readers will know exactly what this reference likely refers to, and it’s going to be painful to watch. Trust us on this.

This season is going to play out a little differently than those in the past, opting for six 90-minute installments instead of the eight hour-long episodes. Former HBO head Richard Plepler referred to the final season as “six movies” instead of episodes of TV, which makes them sound even more epic and promising than the trailer looks.

It’s all come down to this — the long-awaited ending to the series we first started bingeing in 2011. If you’ve stuck around these past eight years, hold on just a little longer.

The final season of Game of Thrones begins on April 14.

Night after night at the stroke of midnight, the street lights in my hometown would switch off, plunging everything into darkness. I lived in this town for three years during my twenties — three years of having a self-imposed curfew because of local authority cuts. 

During those years, I had to make like Cinderella and get home before 12. Not because my car would turn into a pumpkin, but because I was terrified I’d find myself outdoors in the pitch black night. Every plan I made had to factor in the impending darkness that would arrive like clockwork, bringing with it an immediate threat to my safety. Without setting out to do so, my local authority had failed me. 

SEE ALSO: 9 ways science has been totally sexist, and totally wrong

Leafing through the pages of a new book by feminist campaigner and writer Caroline Criado Perez, I read a line that reignited the anger I felt about my curfew (albeit, a self-imposed one). “Urban planning that fails to account for women’s risk of being sexually assaulted is a clear violation of women’s equal right to public spaces,” writes Criado Perez in Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed For Men. 

“What’s interesting is that [councils] often say things like, ‘oh but the crime doesn’t go up,’ without accounting for the fact that women don’t go out because we’ve self-imposed a curfew,” Criado Perez tells me. 

“Numbers and data are meant to just be numbers and data, they are not meant to carry society’s problems within them.”

In her book, Criado Perez takes on the invisibility of women in a world that has not only been designed by men, but with men — and men alone — in mind. A dearth of sex-disaggregated data — data specific to women — means that urban planning, transportation, policy, design, manufacturing are overlooking the needs of half the world’s population. By failing to collect data about women, designers and scientists look through the prism of the “default male” — “seeing men as the human default” when designing products, medicines, our streets, and cities, as Criado Perez puts it. The real-world implications of the hegemony of this male default creates a data gap, causing women daily discomfort to placing their safety and lives at risk. 

Criado Perez — who spearheaded the campaign to erect a statue of a suffragist outside parliament — spent three years researching and writing this book, which essentially reads as an extended investigation into the tangible ways in which women’s lives are affected, and placed at risk, by this data gap. “We have unconsciously just presented the world as male,” says Criado Perez. “Women are being left out of numbers, data, the way in which we allocate our resources, the way in which we design safety for cars, the way in which we design medicine.”

Women serving in the military are provided with equipment designed to fit male bodies. Citing a British Army report, Criado Perez states: “Women in the British Army have been found to be up to seven times more likely than men to suffer from musculoskeletal injuries, even it they have ‘the same aerobic fitness and strength.’” The non-existence of anthropometric female crash-test dummies also means that the impact of car crashes on female bodies isn’t being investigated. Seat-belted female drivers are 47 percent more likely to be seriously injured in a car crash than their male counterparts, a study by the University of Virginia’s Centre for Applied Biomechanics revealed. 

The kernel of the idea for the book came when Criado Perez was researching her last book Do It Like a Woman, and she discovered that female heart attack symptoms are considered atypical and doctors are failing to recognise them. “All the public information I’d ever seen was about typical male heart attack symptoms, so I wouldn’t recognise if I were having a heart attack. Then on top of that, to realise that doctors aren’t realising it either, I just couldn’t believe it really.” “Science is not meant to be like this, science is meant to be objective, science is not meant to suffer from sexism,” Criado Perez tells me. “Numbers and data are meant to just be numbers and data, they are not meant to carry society’s problems within them.”

But, there are aspects of so-called “women’s work” that we simply aren’t collecting data on, Criado Perez says. “Women working in nail bars, there’s very little data on how all the chemicals and dust from filing acrylic nails is going to be impacting on them,” she says. “Because we just aren’t used to thinking of women’s occupations as dangerous.” Criado Perez cites in the book a 2014 review by Anne Rochon Ford, which states that women working in nail salons are frequently exposed to toxic chemicals linked to “cancer, miscarriages, and lung diseases.” 

Indeed, the absence of data on the health impacts of work for women offers a glimpse of how society might view work carried out by women. “We don’t measure it because it’s just seen as ‘women’s work,’ and that can’t possibly be difficult and dangerous.”

“It’s just seen as ‘women’s work,’ and that can’t possibly be difficult and dangerous.”

Reading this book, it’s difficult not to be alarmed. And, Criado Perez says that we should be alarmed. “No one wants women to die,” she says. “I think that when people are made aware of it, they do think it’s shocking.” But, that’s not to say that these industries aren’t aware. “There are people who know about this,” she says. “None of the stuff that I have uncovered is stuff that people in the field don’t know about. Researchers know about this.”

Criado Perez spoke to Astrid Linder, research director of traffic safety at the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, who’s working on what she hopes will be the “first crash-test dummy to accurately represent female bodies. Linder told Criado Perez that female crash-test dummies were suggested in the 1980s, “manufacturers lobbied to not have to include them because of the cost.” 

“When you hear things like that, you can’t help but think, maybe it is a lack of care,” says Criado Perez, caveating that she also doesn’t believe people are evil or that this is some kind of conspiracy. “You would hope that people would put women’s safety above profit margins,” she adds. 

So, how do we go about bridging the data gap and reducing the very real risks that it carries? Well, the answer is right in front of us. “It’s incredibly simple, you just need to collect data on women,” says Criado Perez. “Collect sex-disaggregated data, full stop, the end. The solution is so blindingly simple. It can be fixed tomorrow, you just need to start doing it.” 

Hiring female researchers and ensuring women occupy roles in every echelon of an organisation is also vitally important. “Having women in all positions of your company, from the top to the bottom is not just a box-ticking exercise — it is incredibly important for the outcomes of the work you do because all the evidence shows that women just don’t forget women,” says Criado Perez. 

“Collect sex-disaggregated data, full stop, the end. The solution is so blindingly simple. It can be fixed tomorrow, you just need to start doing it.” 

Hiring more female researchers is one way to ensure that gender-analysed work is produced, but encouraging more young women to enter the STEM field is important — particularly given that only 23 percent of the UK STEM workforce is female. 

In the weeks preceding its publication, Invisible Women has already proved hugely divisive on social media. “There are men who have been very angry saying ‘but men work in the most dangerous occupations,’” says Criado Perez. “There is this idea that women’s work just isn’t dangerous, but that’s because we know about the dangers of men’s work because we’ve been collecting data.” 

This isn’t a book about individuals, it’s about how systems are failing women. I ask Criado Perez if perhaps this data gap can offer us an insight into the way women are seen in society. 

“Insofar as we aren’t seen,” she replies.  “The data gap to me is at the heart of basically everything about the way women are discriminated against,” she adds. “We don’t see their bodies, we don’t see their lives, therefore the world does not account for them.”

The solution is painfully obvious: don’t ignore half the world’s population. 

Our emoji keyboards are ever-expanding, as the pictograph language continues to evolve and become more and more inclusive of all users. 

Up until this point, any emoji featuring two or more people was only been available in the default emoji yellow on iOS. But that’s about to change, and we have dating app Tinder to thank for that. 

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The Unicode Consortium — the gatekeepers of all emoji — will be adding a range of people-holding-hands emoji with a mix of genders and skin colours, following Tinder’s #representlove campaign. 

The interracial couples emoji look like this, and they are pretty damn cute. We got the first look at all 230 emoji coming in 2019 earlier this year, but Unicode is now releasing the final designs, including the new couple emoji.  

Tinder launched the #representlove campaign in February 2018 with a petition for Unicode to include interracial couples on the emoji keyboard. “Isn’t it time all love was represented?” Tinder wrote in the petition, that got over 50,000 signatures over the course of a year. 

Tinder’s reason for getting involved was, per their own statement, that online dating has facilitated an increase in interracial dating and marriages, according to a global Tinder study. 

CMO of Tinder Jenny Campbell said in a statement sent to Mashable that she is proud of the fact the company has helped interracial couples get more visual representation. 

“Tinder advocates for the freedom of people to live how they want to live and love who they want to love,” Campbell said in the statement. 

“The success of our Interracial Couple Emoji campaign shows how powerful the voices are of the more than 50,000 people who joined our cause by signing our petition; together, we effected change.”

Go out there and spread the emoji love.